Inside the List

Behind the Counter: The protagonist of Gabrielle Zevin’s novel “The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry” — new at No. 15 on the hardcover fiction list — is a cranky bookstore owner, depressed after the death of his wife and the theft of a prized volume, who gradually perks up while caring for a baby abandoned in his shop. Book buyers, it turns out, like to read about booksellers. In the past few years, other best-selling examples include “The Marriage Bargain,” by Jennifer Probst (a billionaire proposes to a bookstore owner), “Murder of a Bookstore Babe,” by Denise Swanson (death by shelving), and “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” by Robin Sloan (a web designer finds a night job at a mysterious shop). Yet Zevin recently told readers of The National Post in Canada that as appealing as the idea of running a bookstore is in theory, in reality she’s just not interested. “I think this is the pet pipe dream of many of us who love books,” she said. “I sometimes like to imagine the kind of bookstore I would run. I have, for instance, a deeply impractical idea for a performance art space/minimalist bookstore. The bookstore would only sell one title a month, and there would be a play or art installation of some kind based around that book. However, this is all just fantasy. Running a bookstore is ridiculously difficult, and the challenges bookstores face — e-books, online competition — are enormous. I suspect the closest I’ll ever come to owning a bookstore is having written ‘The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry.’ ”

Dismal Science: After surfacing at the bottom of the hardcover nonfiction list last month, Thomas Piketty’s data-heavy new book of economics, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” fell off for two weeks. Now it returns at No. 15, on a wave of publicity including profiles of the author in The New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education (which includes the unlikely detail that a composer hopes to adapt the book for an opera). If economists are mostly giving Piketty the star treatment, though, he’s not returning the favor. “Piketty’s disdain is unmistakable,” Emily Eakin writes in The Chronicle, “the lament of a scholar long estranged from the mainstream of his profession.” She’s not kidding. In the same article, Piketty — a 42-year-old Frenchman who worked at M.I.T. early in his career before deciding he preferred France — puts it this way: “I found the gap between the self-confidence of the profession and the actual achievement of the profession quite astonishing.”

The Long Tail: Piketty isn’t the only economist benefiting from the attention. Adam Smith’s seminal volume of political economics, “An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” — first published in 1776, and mentioned as a precursor and model for Piketty’s book — is bubbling just under the hardcover nonfiction list, at No. 19 on the extended list.